Thursday, February 27, 2014

Thu Feb 27th Todays News

There are holes in the arguments of those that defend the execution of Lieutenants Harry Morant and Peter Joseph Handcock in 1902. It is not disputed that Morant had had nine Boer prisoners of war shot dead. It is disputed that he had orders to do so. It is also clear that the trial and execution were rushed and probably influenced by high command. It is a sad thing silencing a poet. Showing impeccable comic timing, Spike Milligan died a hundred years later. Harry wrote of a silent girl in the Bulletin

When the sklll'd fashioner of female faces
Designed your mask, he wrought with cunning fist,
And made a mouth expressly to be kiss'd -
Not for shrill utterance nor pert grimaces.
The curved, ripe lips-above the rounded chin -
He dyed the hue of summer's reddest rose,
Then placed a smile upon them to disclose
A glimpse of white and even pearls within.
Those lips are silent, sweetheart! - but your eyes
Are eloquent, and they love's lesson teach
Better than other woman's aptest speech -
In their soft light the tend'rest language lies.
In womankind - the world has long confess'd -
A silent mouth and speaking eyes are best.

First published in The Bulletin, 30 September 1893.

Today is also the anniversary of Lincoln's Cooper Union Address which is credited with earning him the Presidency. It is a celebration of libertarian values, by the day's standards, and Lincoln's debate with Douglas over the issue of slavery is an echo of Abbott's debates with Shorten over the direction of Australia. It is that embarrassing for Shorten, who has shown he is incapable of modelling an agenda which supports workers, as ALP has as a reason for existence. Powerless and inept, Shorten can only support the slave trader like people smugglers and their murderous activity on the grounds that it was the policy that few voters supported.
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Hatches

Happy birthday and many happy returns David Bowles. Born on the same day, across the years, along with

Tim Blair – Thursday,February 27,2014 (9:32am)

Earlier this week, in a tribute to heroic climate change geologist Chris Turney, I became completely trapped by several feet of snow and ice.

This was no simple accomplishment. My trapping required serious lack of planning, massive ignorance of local conditions and a great amount of sheer reckless arrogance. In other words, I perfectly duplicated the mission of the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, except in a rented VW Touareg.

You’d think the economy
was booming. You’d think we had so many jobs we wouldn’t mind closing a
few more factories. You’d think the rest of the world really was making
similar sacrifices. You’d think the planet had warmed these past 16
years. You’d think cutting Australia’s emissions would make a difference
to temperatures.
But then you’d also have to think the Climate Change Authority wasn’t staffed by extremists and fantasists:

The Commission of Audit has criticised the government’s proposed paid
parental leave scheme as excessive at a time when fiscal restraint is
needed.
The Australian Financial Review understands the commission’s interim
report, delivered to the government 13 days ago, supports the concept of
paid parental leave but finds that Mr Abbott’s scheme is too generous
given the state of budget… The finding will complicate plans within
government to release the report as early as possible before the May 13
budget so the public can be educated on the need for cuts.

If the Government does back down, it will want to do so later in its
term to avoid for as long as possible the taint of promise-breaking.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.)

In the last few years, Daniel Hannan has
been recognised all over the English-speaking world as one of this
generation’s most eloquent voices for freedom. Hannan has a scholar’s
mastery of the history of liberty and a politician’s grasp of the
powerful forces vying to determine our future.
Now Hannan brings his urgent and invigorating message to Australia.
Read his conversation with Nick Cater here

Senior Liberal MPs are alarmed at the divisions between Attorney-General George Brandis and [Senate leader Eric Abetz], who form the Senate leadership team.
Senator Abetz’s supporters are accusing the Brandis camp of
destabilising Senator Abetz, with the medium-term ambition of seizing
the Senate leadership from the Employment Minister…
Senator Brandis has denied any breakdown in his relationship with
Senator Abetz, emphatically rejecting claims of leaking against his
colleague.
“Senator Abetz and I have had for almost four years an excellent working
relationship,” Senator Brandis told The Australian. “We are a close and
mutually supportive team as is known to all the senior people in the
government.”

ABC Radio National’s Breakfast show this morning applies a big bucket
of whitewash to Steve Conroy’s disgraceful and damaging attack on
Lieutenant General Angus Campbell.
Commentator Paul Bongiorno says Conroy raised a “valid point” and the
issue should be pushed. Host Fran Kelly says this army does indeed have a
“culture of secrecy” and wonders if the Government “brought this on
itself” by appointing a military man to handle Operation Sovereign
Borders. She praises Bill Shorten’s weak, irrelevant and deceptive
speech as sounding strong.
Nothing is said in their discussion to damn Conroy’s attack on a general
who was merely following orders, and executing them well. Nothing is
said about the damage done by Conroy’s selfish refusal to apologise to
the general. Nothing is said about Shorten’s telling inability to make
Conroy apologise. Nothing is said about Conroy’s (in)ability to function
properly as Labor’s shadow defence minister after such a political
attack on a general - and one that earned him the public rebuke of the
head of army.
Where is the balance on the ABC? What is the Abbott Government going to do about it?
UPDATE
The ABC’s 7.30 last night also chose to ignore the Conroy
fiasco, preferring to go over yet again the trivial fuss over Assistant
Health Minister Fiona Nash’s now-ex chief of staff. And it manages to
file a whole new piece on that despite this admission:

No new revelations, but here’s a big report anyway on a bad Liberal.
UPDATE
Barnaby Joyce on 7.30 tries to explain why the Government
cannot give more than five years of drought relief for farmers, only to
be treated like a naughty schoolboy:

SARAH FERGUSON: But there are lots of
farmers, including in particular cattle farmers, who say it’s going to
take more than five years to rebuild their properties; five years isn’t
long enough.
BARNABY JOYCE: Well I understand that, and in a perfect world we
wouldn’t be heading towards $660 billion in gross debt and $123 billion
in combined deficit.
SARAH FERGUSON: Just stick to the subject.

Is it only on the ABC that explaining an inability to actually pay for a grand scheme under discussion is seen as off-topic?
UPDATE
More whitewash from The Age, which thinks the Conroy uproar is
of almost no interest when there’s more stale fuss to present over the
Liberals’ sinister Fiona Nash, the Liberals’ boat people meanness and
the Liberals’ nasty penny-pinching:

The judge, educated in a Church of England school, tells two Muslim men they do not follow the real Muslim faith:

The two men who hacked to death a young soldier in Woolwich in south London last year have been sentenced to life in prison…
Adebolajo started shouting ‘‘Allahu akbar’’ and Adebowale called out
‘‘that’s a lie’’ as the judge told them their extremist views were ”a betrayal of Islam”.

UPDATE
That SMH report takes eight sentences before mentioning the
killers were Muslim. The caption to the photograph identifies the
alleged ideology only of the protesters:

IN the six years Labor ran our border policies one boat person — on
average — died every two days. The death toll was horrific — at least
1100.

But where were the GetUp candlelight rallies then to match the one we
saw last week for the one boat person, Iranian Reza Berati, who died
last week under the Abbott Government?
Where was the wall-to-wall ABC coverage? Where were the demands then for
the resignation of the politicians behind the deadliest mistake of any
peacetime Australian government — to weaken our border laws in 2008 to
seem more “compassionate”, only to put people smugglers back into
business?

What we are seeing now is not just the hypocrisy of the Left. It is also
an illustration of a key difference between them and conservatives: the
Left judging by how things seem; conservatives by how things work.
It is the difference between children and adults.
(Read full article here.)

PROVING Tim Flannery wrong on global warming is too easy. Explaining why he’s still a guru is the hard one.
This week the University of Canberra honoured our former Chief Climate
Change Commissioner by letting him give its annual Krebs Lecture.
Strange. Shouldn’t warmists distance themselves from a man whose astonishing record of dud predictions has so hurt their cause?
(Read full article here.)

QANTAS needs both things it is asking the
Government for — a debt guarantee and the freedom to copy Virgin
Australia in seeking major foreign shareholders.
The results from Qantas today are also going to show with brutal clarity
that even with that help, it will still face a fundamental struggle to
survive…
Now, there’s an important qualification to government help. The debt
guarantee should operate in a strictly limited way — just to bridge the
gap to the repeal of the Qantas shareholder restrictions.
Once Qantas is able to get major foreign shareholders, as does Virgin,
it would be completely inappropriate for that company to continue to be
guaranteed by the taxpayer.
Of course, all that is in the hands of the uncertain Senate after June.

McCrann is right to challenge the critics of Qantas CEO Alan Joyce to
come up with an alternative plan that did not involve falling market
share, increasing losses and fewer jobs.
How stupid does that damaging 2011 industrial dispute look now? How many of the unionists today losing their jobs fought three years ago against the cost cutting the airline clearly needed?:

When independent arbitrator Fair Work Australia invoked national
interest in terminating all industrial action between Qantas and
striking aviation unions at 2 a.m. Monday, it brought an end all
industrial action in a bitter dispute that has dragged on for 14 months…

Make no mistake: this was an industrial war that struck at the heart of
nationalism, protectionism and old-school political divides…
The long-running labor dispute at the world’s second-oldest airline
reached its boiling point during the Qantas Annual General Meeting on
Friday, October 28.
Chief executive Alan Joyce ... accused the unions of “slowly crippling our business and trashing our brand."…
His restructuring plan to make Qantas more competitive in the
international market received near unanimous support from shareholders…
The plans were the catalyst for two unions—the Australian Licensed
Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) and the Transport Workers Union
(TWU)—to implement rolling strikes this year. A third union, the
Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA), made
unauthorized, in-flight announcements to vent their concerns…
With the ongoing dispute already costing Qantas $70 million, Joyce
threatened an employee lockout, and promised to ground the airline at a
cost of $20 million a day by way of forcing the government’s hand in
ordering arbitration.
This is exactly what happened.

[Australian editor Chris] Mitchell, the nation’s most experienced
newspaper editor, said he should not need to point out to Barry that the
claims by Media Watch that his newspaper was losing $50m were 3 1/2
times more than The Australian’s actual loss.

This mistake Barry still needs to apologise for:

“Paul Barry shows an edited clip of Sharri Markson’s interview with me,” Mr Mitchell said.
“The full interview on The Australian website shows my quote was specifically rejecting the $50m figure.
“This quote was edited [by Media Watch] in a deliberately dishonest way
to make it look like I was admitting something I was specifically
denying...”

And there is this: exactly what kind of News Corp “insider” was Barry
relying on? How much of an “insider” was this anonymous source really
when he could get the Australian’s losses so wildly wrong?
What else did Barry get wrong, given how heavily he relied on this “insider” - or perhaps two of them - for his claims against a media organisationhe clearly hates?
As Gerard Henderson notes:

When discussing News Corp publications [this week], his sources included
“one former News Corp editor”, an “ex-News Corp editor”, “another
ex-News Corp executive”, an “ex-News Corp executive”, “insiders”, “one
former News Corp editor”, “another former News Corp executive” and “a
former executive”, along with “industry insiders” and the catch-all
“some”. In any decent university course such a dissertation would have
earned a fail mark or, at best, a requirement that the piece be
rewritten.

Henderson will be my guest in my new NewsWatch segment when the Bolt Report returns on Network 10 on Sunday at 10am and 4pm.

Morrison’s sin was to show too little scepticism in relaying information
later found to be inaccurate. He is also, gasp, rude to reporters. He
caused particular offence on Saturday when he released his statement at
8.44pm, even though the 24-hour news cycle was invented a few years ago.
Late edition Sunday papers reported it, Sunday’s television talk shows
were full of it and it has received saturation coverage ever since. Some
cover-up.

This is a rough patch for the government, which is bound to get worse,
but what tends to be forgotten is just how rocky it was in the Howard
years, especially in the beginning.
Howard lost two frontbenchers in his first six months, and in 18 months, hit a grand total of seven.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly says she lives in Australia but I fear there has been some mistake:

Say there was civil war here. Say some West Australian mining despot
took power and began censoring news, jailing journalists, disappearing
opponents. Say you were dragged from your bed, interrogated at midnight,
your kids threatened with rape and torture. It’s not so far fetched.

Er, it’s not? If so, shouldn’t Farrelly actually devote her entire
column to explaining why we are on the brink of this tyranny, just so we
have time to pack or to fight? Which mining despot does she suspect as
likely to become dictator in this “no so far fetched” future?

Now Hanson has gone but the hate-wells are still open, gushing red like
the earth we refuse to share, and the blood we spill defending it.

Wow. Where are all those people we’re killed to defend this land? Does she mean boat people? Which ones? Where?

Fear makes us harsh, as in 1930s Germany and any populace that accommodates an inhumane regime.

So we’re like Nazis now? And Abbott like Hitler? Gosh. So why are
“refugees” fleeing towards us and not from? And seeing that Manus was
Kevin Rudd’s idea in the first place, shouldn’t his “regime” be
criticised, too?

There’s probably some guilt in there too, since many asylum seekers are from countries we have helped destroy.

Yet in this whole immigration shemozzle three things are abundantly clear. One, that we are all boat people.

We are? My parents flew here on an invitation from the government. How
does that make me a “boat person”, trying to get here illegally? Are we
all illegally here, then?

Many of our ancestors came explicitly as criminals. Most of those, having arrived, colluded in what would now be war crimes.

They did? Not my parents or my wife’s ancestors, lady, or those of my
closest friends. So define “many”. Identity the “war crimes”. While
we’re at it, identify the “war”.

We know this when even China can credibly critique our human rights record.

“Credibly”? China to Farrelly is now a “credible” arbiter of human rights, and we are not?
Does Farrelly truly have an audience for such bizarre fantasising? How
fashionable is this torrent of hatred and fear of this country?
Or maybe she should just check her passport. Is she really in this country or in, say, China’s Tibet?

Jacqueline Maley’s copy gets dangerously close to the wild misrepresentation of her sub-editor’s headline:

In the hunt for the high moral ground in politics, the defence of ‘’Hey, at least we’re not as bad as Thommo!‘’ is not usually one’s first stop.
And yet, in a press conference on Wednesday, when defending the actions
of his Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash, Prime Minister Tony Abbott
deployed the unusual tactic of comparing his government’s conduct to his
predecessor’s in relation to the erstwhile member for Dobell Craig
Thomson.

So did Abbott honestly use the phrase - twice put in quotation marks -
that is ascribed to him: ‘At least we’re not as bad as Thommo’?
Of course not. From much deeper into the story, Abbott’s real words:

And then, he launched Thommo defence: ‘’I’d ask you
to compare the way this government has dealt with this with the way the
former government dealt with the scandal involving the former member for
Dobell who was, let’s face it, protected for three years.’’

And as Maley then acknowledges the truth of the words her paper mocks:

Salvation is the work of God. It is he alone who quickens the soul "dead in trespasses and sins," and it is he also who maintains the soul in its spiritual life. He is both "Alpha and Omega." "Salvation is of the Lord." If I am prayerful, God makes me prayerful; if I have graces, they are God's gifts to me; if I hold on in a consistent life, it is because he upholds me with his hand. I do nothing whatever towards my own preservation, except what God himself first does in me. Whatever I have, all my goodness is of the Lord alone. Wherein I sin, that is my own; but wherein I act rightly, that is of God, wholly and completely. If I have repulsed a spiritual enemy, the Lord's strength nerved my arm. Do I live before men a consecrated life? It is not I, but Christ who liveth in me. Am I sanctified? I did not cleanse myself: God's Holy Spirit sanctifies me. Am I weaned from the world? I am weaned by God's chastisements sanctified to my good. Do I grow in knowledge? The great Instructor teaches me. All my jewels were fashioned by heavenly art. I find in God all that I want; but I find in myself nothing but sin and misery. "He only is my rock and my salvation." Do I feed on the Word? That Word would be no food for me unless the Lord made it food for my soul, and helped me to feed upon it. Do I live on the manna which comes down from heaven? What is that manna but Jesus Christ himself incarnate, whose body and whose blood I eat and drink? Am I continually receiving fresh increase of strength? Where do I gather my might? My help cometh from heaven's hills: without Jesus I can do nothing. As a branch cannot bring forth fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can I, except I abide in him. What Jonah learned in the great deep, let me learn this morning in my closet: "Salvation is of the Lord."

Evening

"Behold, if the leprosy have covered all his flesh, he shall pronounce him clean that hath the plague." - Leviticus 13:13

Strange enough this regulation appears, yet there was wisdom in it, for the throwing out of the disease proved that the constitution was sound. This evening it may be well for us to see the typical teaching of so singular a rule. We, too, are lepers, and may read the law of the leper as applicable to ourselves. When a man sees himself to be altogether lost and ruined, covered all over with the defilement of sin, and in no part free from pollution; when he disclaims all righteousness of his own, and pleads guilty before the Lord, then he is clean through the blood of Jesus, and the grace of God. Hidden, unfelt, unconfessed iniquity is the true leprosy; but when sin is seen and felt, it has received its deathblow, and the Lord looks with eyes of mercy upon the soul afflicted with it. Nothing is more deadly than self-righteousness, or more hopeful than contrition. We must confess that we are "nothing else but sin," for no confession short of this will be the whole truth; and if the Holy Spirit be at work with us, convincing us of sin, there will be no difficulty about making such an acknowledgment--it will spring spontaneously from our lips. What comfort does the text afford to truly awakened sinners: the very circumstance which so grievously discouraged them is here turned into a sign and symptom of a hopeful state! Stripping comes before clothing; digging out the foundation is the first thing in building--and a thorough sense of sin is one of the earliest works of grace in the heart. O thou poor leprous sinner, utterly destitute of a sound spot, take heart from the text, and come as thou art to Jesus--

"For let our debts be what they may, however great or small,
As soon as we have nought to pay, our Lord forgives us all.
'Tis perfect poverty alone that sets the soul at large:
While we can call one mite our own, we have no full discharge."

===

Today's reading: Numbers 12-14, Mark 5:21-43 (NIV)

Miriam and Aaron Oppose Moses

1 Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. 2 "Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?" they asked. "Hasn't he also spoken through us?" And the LORD heard this.

3 (Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.)

Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman

21 When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22 Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. 23 He pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live." 24 So Jesus went with him....

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About Me

I'm author of History in a Year by the Conservative Voice aka History of the World in a Year by the Conservative Voice.

I'm the Conservative Voice.

I'm looking to make contact with those who might use my skill.

I have an m-audio mobile pre amp fed by the audiotechnica 2041sp condensor mic pack. Prior to 15/4/06, I'd used a Shure sm-58 that required a nuclear blast to register a sound or the internal mic of my aged imac, which has a penchance to recording my breathing. I also used a Griffin itrip, until the community convinced me it was not hiding my talent as well as the other mics.

I am a Writer and an occasional Math Teacher (Sir, what's the occasion?). I like to sing, having no instrumental talent (cannot even clap in time, and yes, I'm aware singing badly IS obnoxious).

I have performed the finale to Les Miserables before an audience of 500. I have also sung before a similar audience (students, parents) renditions of 'I Will' (Beatles), 'Mr Cairo' (Jon Vangelis) and 'I am Australian' (Seekers). Now I seek another profession because the audience hates me ..